


The Gory Details

by drladybird



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: @bronzeagelove let me borrow her OCs!, Alien Biology, Biting, Cuddling & Snuggling, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Height Differences, Jealousy, Light BDSM, Menstruation, Open Relationships, Slut Shaming, Xenophilia, brief negative portrayal of the Turian Hierarchy Septimus Oraka and Tiran's mum, brief penis injury mention, but also don't read this if menstruation squicks you, don't read this if you want menstruation kink, how do i adult, revenge of the annoyed salarians, semi-deserved slut shaming, the menstruation is not fetishised, the safeword is ouch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:35:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22401157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drladybird/pseuds/drladybird
Summary: One big downside of having an alien girlfriend: weird, gross alien biology.Did you know that human uteruses sometimes just… ooze blood, for no reason?And if you panic and try to call an ambulance, the human laughs at you.
Relationships: Chiho Miura (OC)/Quintus Adessar (OC), Original Female Human Character(s)/Original Male Turian Character(s)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 52





	The Gory Details

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BronzeAgeLove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BronzeAgeLove/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Night Shift](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13494184) by [BronzeAgeLove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BronzeAgeLove/pseuds/BronzeAgeLove). 



> I’m using @bronzeagelove’s OCs – their previous adventures start here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13494184/chapters/30945906  
> I’m also using her alien headcanons rather than my own. (Except for the asari scales thing. I perpetrated that one myself. I’d like to spread it, assuming anyone else wants it!)  
> Battle Maidens belongs to @autodiscothings, who writes amazing post-war C-Sec fanfiction here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soignee/pseuds/SE_Soignee  
> I’d love some constructive criticism.

Quintus Adessar half-woke in the warm soft darkness, and reached out to wrap the blankets more securely around himself. Something tugged them back.

Still mostly asleep, he tried pulling harder.

" _Damn_ it, Quintus!" Chiho yelped. "That one's mine, OK, I brought my own blanket! If you want me to sleep naked I need one fucking blanket!"

What? Oh... yeah... she'd stayed over. And tried to cook him a healthy dinner. It had been edible, once he scraped off the burnt bits and drowned it in extra-spicy fish sauce.

He made incoherent cuddly noises.

"Stop rumbling at me, Quintus, and give me my blanket. _Blanket._ Higher brain functions online, please?"

He let go, and waved one hand around in the dark till he found... aha! Soft, padded bare skin. For squeezing!

"Maybe you can grope my ass when I'm not trying to _sleep?"_

Oh, yeah, that was fair. Even if he was kind of turned on now. Humans smelled _wonderful_ \- maybe it was a bit of an acquired taste, but deep and rich and complex and lovely.

“All blankets are mine,” he declared. “They love me and want to embrace me. And your ass. It’s my favourite stress ball.” He squeezed it again before pulling his hand away.

She groaned. “Maybe turn the higher brain functions off again. They’re not helping.”

He rolled over and went back to sleep.

* * *

He woke in the dark again, and something was horribly wrong.

Blood. He could smell iron-based blood. 

“Chiho?” Definitely human blood, old and half-dried. He wasn’t imagining it. Had she injured herself in her sleep somehow, or...

“‘Mm tryna sleep!”

“Are you all right?” She was conscious, anyway, thank all the spirits. Shit, he’d skipped the last human first-aid course, why’d he done that? 

He took a deep breath and flicked the lights on with his omni-tool. Chiho growled something in her father’s language and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Her scrunched-up face looked normal, the right colour with no signs of pain. The pulse in her neck was slow and regular. The thin white sheet was wrapped tightly round her body... she’d pulled it in between her legs, and it was stained bright red at the crotch.

“Chiho! You’re bleeding!” He’d been rough with her earlier - she’d enjoyed it at the time, laughed and fought back and bitten him hard enough to bruise, but had he injured her somehow? There wasn’t much external bleeding, so as long as she wasn’t bleeding internally, they wouldn’t need an ambulance -

“What? Oh fuck.” She jerked bolt upright and glared at the bloodstained sheet. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! Shit, Quintus, that was supposed to be next week!“ She leapt out of bed, moving easily. She looked furious and _was she angry with him? Had he hurt her?_ There was blood crusted on her inner thighs and _shit that couldn’t be good -_

“I’m not good at xenomedicine -" his voice had gone up an octave - "we don’t need an ambulance, do we?” Wait, Chiho always tried to be far too tough for her own good, maybe he should call an ambulance whatever she said -

She’d frozen and she was staring at him with her mouth open. “You... whaaa? Ambulance? Please tell me you’re joking?”

“You’re bleeding everywhere!” She didn’t sound worried or scared, so that had to be a good sign...

“Holy mother of fuck!” She clenched her fists. “Quintus. Normal human thing. Uteruses sometimes bleed on stuff. Annoying, sometimes it hurts a bit, if it hurts a lot or causes problems then the doctor can probably fix it. How do you not know that?”

What? Sounded weird, but he wasn’t a xenobiologist. “Er. ‘M not human?” So he didn’t need to worry? “Er, my school sex ed, we got the weird teacher who was all “don’t have sex with humans or they’ll slit your throat in your sleep, that’s all you need to know about humans,” and the boot camp refresher course got sidetracked panicking about allergic reactions - are you sure it’s not a problem?”

She stared up at him and took a deep breath. “Absolutely certain. Just let me clean myself up a bit, damn it, and I’ll wash the sheets... shit, I left my cup at my place! You don’t... shit...” She glared at the bed for a moment. “Quintus, I’m pretty sure the convenience store has tampons. Can you go and buy me some?”

“Buy... what?”

“Absorbent things. I’ll text you the word.” His omni-tool buzzed. “And I’ll get things clean.” Her furry eyebrows drew together. “OK?”

"You _sure_ you're all right?” She looked fine, but _human blood belongs inside humans._

He'd never smelled that much iron-based blood before, outside a crime scene. Parts of his brain were trying to go into Bad Day At Work mode. 

Her shoulders tensed. _"_ I'm fine! _Quintus. I’m just regrowing some organs, like normal._ You're used to women being hornier than usual a couple of days out of every month, right? Same level of scary!”

“...right. Organs? Buy... absorbent things.” He chucked on his bedrobe and dashed for the front door.

* * *

There was an all-night convenience store at the base of his apartment tower. It was empty except for the clerk, a plump grey salarian, who was slouched in his chair with one leg wrapped around the back of his neck. He didn’t look up from his omni-tool when Quintus walked in.

Tampons. Those would be with the species-specific toiletries, right? Probably next to the fur-grooming products and the whatsit, the stuff for making humans smell less strong?

There were a lot of weird little packets labelled in English. Quintus understood spoken English, but the written language, er... And his omni-tool’s translator app couldn’t read the fancy script.

_No need to hurry. No one's in danger. It's just really weird alien biology, OK? You’ve seen far worse at work, so take a deep breath and stop panicking._

Now, if he imagined Alena saying that to him, it actually sounded convincing... 

_No. Don't ring Alena for moral support. She can't read or speak human languages, and she's asleep._

The clerk unwrapped his knee from his neck, stood up, and wandered over to check on Quintus. He had startlingly acid-yellow eyes, probably cosmetically enhanced, and he was wearing gold glitter lipstick and gold bows on his horns. His bodysuit was patterned with cute, colourful moths and auspicious candy.

 _Well, if he’s going to stand behind me, he might as well be helpful._ "Do you have... _tampons?"_

The clerk stared at him, little fleshy mouth half-open. Maybe he was pronouncing it wrong?

"Um.” Quintus waved at the mysterious packets. “Things for... human uteruses. To stop them bleeding on things?"

The clerk blinked. “Human. Uteruses?”

“I have a human, ah, friend. OK?” _I’m not taking backchat about my sex life from a salarian!_

_No one in their right mind would want me to breed, anyway._

The horizontal pupils widened from slits to ovals. “Oh! You’re that cop who lives underneath my cousins and thinks he can sing!”

That stung. “I can sing!”

“Not according to them, you can’t!”

_“I can sing!”_

The clerk smiled sweetly. “So why did Admiral Kandros throw you out of the army, anyway? Was it her or her son?”

“What? Her son? What would he have to do with...” Kandros Jr existed. Kandros Jr was apparently with a counter-terrorism Special Forces unit, smiting evil so innocents could rest easy, lifting heavy objects so people could swoon over his muscles, that sort of thing. But what could he possibly have to do with Quintus? Quintus had arguably committed "crimes against the Hierarchy", but he wasn't a terrorist!

Look, he shouldn’t have been hacking into classified files. But he’d noticed discrepancies in the expense reports, so of course he’d chased them. And then old Kandros caught him and decided to throw a fit about insubordination and security leaks, instead of worrying about what he’d found. Government money was evaporating because generals were spending it on spa weekends, a senior Blackwatch officer was using his equipment allowance to hire sex workers... 

Quintus got threatened, screamed at, yelled at by all his relatives, and handed over to C-Sec like a pile of slightly mouldy second-hand clothing. The generals got told not to do it again.

Kandros had probably done him a favour. She’d certainly put him closer to the good nightclubs! These days, if he found strange transactions, he was supposed to chase them - well, unless someone was making deals with the mob again, but that didn’t happen much. Still, _fuck her._

Not literally. May she never be fucked by anyone. Ever again.

“Hah!” The clerk slapped his podgy thigh. “You recreationally copulated with Admiral Ravis Kandros on a bet? And you were stupid enough to let her find out it was a bet?”

“ _What?_ ” That wasn’t remotely... look, he’d thought she was hot till the whole mess, but there was no way she’d ever... “No! What kind of stupid rumour is that? And it’s none of your business! _Which packet is the tampons?_ ”

“Behold!” The clerk grabbed a small paper packet, tossed it into the air, and caught it. “Human tampons!”

“Thanks. And I’ll just...” Wait, he didn’t have any levo food in his apartment - what was Chiho going to eat for breakfast? He dodged round the clerk and grabbed a packet of reheatable locust-and-garlic buns.

“Ooh yeah, those are the good flavour!” the clerk chirped. “So which human is this? I’ll ask my cousins if it’s still the little one who swears. You’re not doing _this_ on a bet, are you?”

“No!” Well, it might have started off as kind of a bet with himself... in hindsight, that was no way to treat a coworker, and he was lucky it hadn’t ended horribly... that was beside the point! “I’m just trying to buy tampons! It’s not my fault the walls are so thin!”

The clerk smirked. “Thought humans were monogamous. Does she know she’s sharing you with half the Citadel?”

“Yes!” And, look, he was fine with whatever she was doing with... well, maybe he wasn’t entirely fine, but that was hardly this damn clerk’s business! “Sell me the tampons!”

The clerk sold him the tampons and the buns, while giggling. He tried to look dignified. It would have been easier if he wasn’t barefoot in a fish-print robe.

* * *

Chiho was still perfectly healthy when he got back, but she’d tensed up like a tripwire. She'd pulled most of the sheets off his bed and piled them up in his shower, and she was soaking them in cold water.

“You know what?” she snapped. “If the laundry can’t get the stains out, I’ll just buy you new sheets. OK?”

Chin up, fists clenched, like she thought she might have to fight him.

“Don’t worry, Chiho, as long as they’re clean I can cope with a few stains. Just throw them down the chute.” That relaxed her slightly - thank every spirit, because he really wasn’t up to dealing with Issues. “I already bled on some of them, after the unexpected varren thing.” He’d needed a lot of sutures, and the dressings hadn’t been quite waterproof, and he’d decided the mess was someone else’s problem and chucked the sheets straight down the laundry chute, where they’d sat around for hours while the stains set. Whatever your blood was made from, all oxygen-carrying pigments stained fabric.

She took a deep breath. “Good. You’re off work tomorrow, right?”

“I do own spare sheets! ...But yeah, I don’t think I can go back to sleep now.” His heart was still beating slightly too fast. Human blood belongs inside humans, damn it! And the smell really did remind him of murders, and gruesome injuries, and those navy punishment details where they'd made him scrub bits of batarian pirate off the ground teams' hardsuits. “Do you want to go back to sleep? I’ll make the bed?”

He handed her the mysterious packet.

“Ah,” she said, “thanks! Nah, I can’t sleep either, and my next shift’s overnight. Let me just...” she waved him out of the bathroom and closed the door.

He put the locust buns in his mostly-empty fridge, and sat on the couch to extranet-search “tampon”.

Ah. That made sense.

The lining falls off, instead of being reabsorbed? Why?

Chiho wandered out of the bathroom with her arms full of drippy sheets, and stuffed them down the chute in his living room. Excellent - it was the laundry’s problem now.

She grabbed his spare bedrobe off the couch and put it on. On him, it was knee-length - it covered most of her legs. 

One minor benefit of spending time with Chiho: she made him look tall. He’d spent most of his life being a pretty little delicacy, and it made a lovely change.

“Fucking inconvenient hormones,” she said. “That was supposed to be next week.”

He shrugged, and pulled her into his lap. She slung a soft arm round his neck. She still smelled faintly of blood, but mostly like herself.

“I’ll live,” he told her. “Hey, that’s the price we pay for multi-species society. We put up with gross alien stuff.”

Like asari shedding their whole damn skin every few months. He’d once had a maiden leave a pile of soggy scales in his shower. He’d come down with the massive screaming squicks, and had to beg Alena to come round and clean up the mess. Blood... eh, he could handle blood. It wasn’t even a disease transmission risk when it was levo.

Chiho sank her fingernails into the sensitive skin under his jaw, hard enough to hurt but gently enough that it hurt rather pleasantly. “Gross alien stuff. This from the man who left two of his used teeth in my bathroom sink.”

“Er. In my defence, the sink was already covered in shed fur?” _Go to the Citadel! Meet exotic aliens! Discover the exotic fur-based dust bunny!_

She snorted. “I put my hand down on one and nearly cut myself! Fur doesn’t cut you!”

“...yeah, OK.” He rubbed his face against her hair. It wasn’t his place to scent-mark her properly, but just a little bit?

...so that other turians would know she was his?

...which she wasn’t! But if he tried to picture her with anyone else, even fantasies where he got to watch, he felt weirdly lonely and had the urge to pick her up and cuddle her and cling tightly so she couldn’t get away...

...wow, that was hypocritical. What are you, Quintus, some stud louza? Humping every hen in the barnyard and half the water troughs, then biting the farmer on the knee for Looking At My Girls?

He wrapped his arms around Chiho, squeezed her tightly, and fluffed up her hair with his mandibles. The inch-long bristles were nicely rough against his face.

“Right,” she said, relaxing back into his touch. “If we're not going back to bed, what else is there to do?”

“I know some ways we could pass the time!” He started to slide a hand under her robe and up her thigh, slow and teasing, and abruptly stopped. “...Wait. Is that, er, possible right now?”

Were the bits... like... fragile while they were regrowing, or something?

She leaned back and kissed him quickly on the nose. “Makes a mess, but not if you do it in the shower, and I could use a fuck. You’d better use your hand, though, and wash it properly afterwards, with your allergies.”

Ooh. Human blood. His delicate mucous membranes. Mild but significant Earth mammal allergy. That didn’t sound like a good combination. 

He took his hand off her thigh.

And he wasn’t going to risk swallowing human blood. He’d accidentally eaten beef jerky once. That wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.

“I’m not letting you get chemical burns on your dick,” Chiho went on. “Because if you expose it to alien chemicals and all the skin peels off, I’ll have to listen to you whining about it.”

“Thank you for the mental image, Constable Miura!” He shoved her off his lap and onto the couch and leapt theatrically to his feet. “I’m not putting my precious rod anywhere near you now! Because I think it’s hiding inside my ribcage!” It’d heal in a few days - couldn’t be worse than the Inappropriate Herbs in Homemade Lube incident - but owwwwww, _not_ worth it!

She laughed, stood up, grabbed both his mandibles, and yanked his face down till they were eye to eye. “Like I said. I'm not listening to that amount of whining! Hey, you want to watch Battle Maidens?” She kissed him hard on the mouth while he was down there, then let go. “The heroes lose their clothes far too much, but it has great fight scenes.”

Battle Maidens was not a “classic”, whatever that new detective said, but it was fun in a silly way. “Sure. I think we paused it halfway through the swamp bit?”

She took her eyes off him to mess with her omni-tool. _Revenge time!_ He darted behind her and nipped the back of her neck, just hard enough that she could feel the points of his teeth.

She squeaked and wriggled adorably till he let go, then smiled broadly at him, grabbed his arm, and sunk her little square teeth into the soft skin inside his wrist.

Fuck, that hurt! "Ow! Too hard!"

She let go immediately. "Oops. Sorry."

"Ow." No, she hadn't broken the skin. He didn’t think blunt human teeth could break his skin (although he wouldn't bet on that, after some of the bar fights he’d seen), but that was the _bad_ kind of ouch. "Kiss it better!"

She kissed it gently.

"If that bruises," he complained, "I'm going to have to wear long-sleeved shirts so no one asks why I've got alien toothmarks on my arm. If you're going to use me as a chew toy, attack somewhere more covered!"

"Sorry, I'll be more careful." She winked at him.

There was something weirdly appealing about the idea of her _marking_ him, leaving prints in his flesh...

Chiho started up the holoscreen, and flicked through to a paused animation of an angry shirtless asari biotically throwing a tree.

The tree sailed through the air, slammed into a glowing blue wall, and exploded. A thinner, purpler asari - wearing the bottom half of a Huntress uniform, and a white lace corset - yelled “is that all you’ve got?” and made a rude gesture.

Chiho climbed back onto his lap and tickled him under the chin.


End file.
